Khaled Ahmed was your favorite intellectual’s favorite intellectual.
Starting as a young economics instructor at Lahore’s Government College, Khaled soon joined Pakistan’s foreign service, where he absorbed languages—especially Russian—and deepened his polymath credentials and worldly understanding.
He found languages endlessly fascinating, which led him to abandon a promising government career for the penury of a writer’s life. A man of concision and finest analysis, the product of his superhuman appetite for books, Khaled mentored generations of journalists—at publications like Frontier Post, The Nation, Daily Times, Aaj Kal. He was an annual fixture at the Lahore Literary Festival, bringing libraries of knowledge to the talks he moderated.
“The most learned man in Pakistan,” says Jugnu Mohsin, who Khaled hired for her first job in journalism at Pakistan Times in 1985. She would later become founding publisher of The Friday Times, where I first met him a decade after that.
Allergic to any kind of self-projection, he could seem stern and unapproachable. One evening at TFT, I froze as it became clear he was approaching me. Khaled had an opinion on my recent “Eye Catcher,” a short, regular feature that highlighted young up-and-comers. The piece had a high-school classmate of mine expressing disillusionment with Pakistan, saying college in London would be his one-way ticket out. “That was a good piece,” he said, and walked back to his business. I was smug for a week.
As someone who more than held his own at literary salons with the likes of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Intizar Husain, Khaled took in the rapid decline of Pakistan with great distress. “In the anthropological perspective,” Khaled wrote in an editorial for the Standard in September, “Pakistanis are performing the rite of immolation which gives them spiritual satisfaction and validates their identity as a nation.” Yet he never considered decamping to less self-destructive climes.
He worked with us first at Newsweek Pakistan, and lately at The Standard.
Last year, when PTI throngs occupied Lahore’s Zaman Park to guard their leader, former Prime Minister Imran Khan (who also happened to be his cousin), Khaled was often restricted to his residence. “Unfortunately there is trouble,” he texted that March. “My sister under threat for telling the truth on TV channel [about the stalwarts shielding Khan from arrest]. The truth-to-power principle clearly ran in his family, often at personal risk. But even in such moments of chaos, his appreciation for life’s absurdities endured. When he came back at work, Khaled said he was waking every morning during this siege of his neighborhood to the exasperating sight of tribal men answering the call of nature by “befouling” his front yard.
Khaled was a prolific writer and received a national honor for his acclaimed nonfiction books. He dedicated his 2016 one, Sleepwalking to Surrender, to me: “For Fasih Ahmed … who made it possible for me to write with freedom and made my writings readable with his first-rate professional editing.” I was smug for a year.
This was unearned praise, and one of several kindnesses from one of the kindest men.
To borrow from his own words, Khaled was a man of “obstinate depth.” In yet another period when voices of constructive dissent are increasingly stifled, his fascinating words shimmer in the gloaming, helping readers navigate the pressing darkness.
We join Khaled’s son, Taimur, Eman, family, and friends in mourning his loss—and in celebrating his life and legacy.
Ahmed is Editor of the Standard.
Conversations with History: Khaled Ahmed discusses Pakistan and Islamic fundamentalism with UC Berkeley’s Harry Kreisler in July 2002